


you, the moon. you, the road.

by plutoandpersephone



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Android Emotions, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, M/M, Post-Android Revolution (Detroit: Become Human), Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-06-24 04:52:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19716574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plutoandpersephone/pseuds/plutoandpersephone
Summary: Post revolution, Hank and Connor continue to work together at the DPD, their reputation unparalleled. But work is dangerous and unpredictable and Connor has to learn how to navigate his newly deviant emotions - if he's going to work out the truth of his feelings for Hank.





	you, the moon. you, the road.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my submission for the HankCon Big Bang 2019! I had such a blast writing this. Thank you to the glorious [Emily Hu](https://twitter.com/emilyyyhu) who leant her skills for this piece. The artwork is incredible.

There should be just one safe place  
In the world, I mean  
this world. People get hurt here. People fall down and stay down and I don’t like  
the way the song goes.  
You, the moon. You, the road. You, the little flowers  
by the side of the road.

\- Road Music, Richard Siken

In the end, the end is just the beginning.

The revolution is not the fire, as the authorities had initially warned, to be stamped out by the force of heavy military boots. Instead, it is the spark which starts flames rolling through Detroit, across the States, flickering out towards the rest of the world. 

Connor starts to see Markus on the television several times a week, sometimes more than once a day. It would be easy enough for him to access and download sufficient data on the aftermath of the uprising without physically sitting down and watching the news, but he enjoys watching Markus speak. There’s a restrained calmness to him that Connor finds contagious - although he knows that’s quite impossible, really. 

The others are with him too, all the survivors. North, with her fierce, biting words, Josh’s peaceful, dark eyes. Simon, who turns his gentle face toward Markus as though he holds the fate of the world in the palm of his hand. Maybe he does.

Talks begin within darkened halls and move swiftly into high, bright rooms filled with cameras. Connor follows the developments as best he can, proposed rights for androids to own properties, businesses, to be paid a minimum wage.

It’s new and frenetic and Connor feels more scared than he ever has in his life. The weight of deviancy, he supposes.

Amidst all of this, Hank holds him. Pulls him close to his chest beneath the sound of rolling traffic, the cool sunlight reflecting off the snow around them. The smell of petrol fumes and lingering fried food is deliciously familiar to Connor. It reminds him of a time when things were just starting - with Jericho, with CyberLife, with Hank.

“Jesus Christ,” Hank murmurs, his mouth turned into the crook of Connor’s neck. In the cool air, his breath sends a sweep of warmth coursing through him. “This’s all been fucking something, hasn’t it?”

Connor senses that the question doesn’t require an answer, and he wouldn’t know what to say if it did. His hands finds the small of Hank’s back, wrapping together over the rough cotton of his coat. 

The world will never be quiet now, Connor thinks. How can it be, now that deviancy crackles through every line of his code? But this, this. He filters the traffic noise down as best he can, thinking of very little else outside of the steady beat of Hank’s heart. Constant but a little fast, he notes, wondering if it has something, anything, to do with their proximity. 

“Where’re you gonna go now?” Hank asks him, before Connor can allow his thoughts to roam anymore wildly. He pulls back and Connor can see that his brow is furrowed. Concern, he reads. Concern for him, for his wellbeing, the uncertain future that he is sure to meet in the dawning of their new world.

“I don’t know.” Connor’s tone is matter of fact. Really, does it matter where he ends up? He doesn’t need to eat or drink, he doesn’t need the comfort of a bed for the rest that he takes.

“You could,” Hank swallows hard and Connor watches the shadow shift against his throat. “You could come and stay with me. If - if you don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Connor has heard about the android housing complexes opening all around the city. Mostly in renovated, previously abandoned buildings. Mostly human owned - those hoping to make an easy dollar off the androids’ newly found freedom and their lack of basic human needs.

He tries to imagine somewhere that he has never seen before. No need for a kitchen, a bathroom, a bed. There’d be a television, maybe, and a terminal. Perhaps somewhere to put personal effects, if the human had considered that androids might have such things. And alongside it, he remembers. Hank’s house, so lived in, the smell of old coffee and takeaway food in the kitchen, the stacks of books - real books, with yellowing pages, the way Hank liked them. Hank’s bed, crumpled sheets and pillowcases. 

The clinical cube of an android residence isn’t even an option when he considers the possibility of Hank’s home. 

“Yes. I’d like that very much, Lieutenant.”

Hank looks taken aback; clearly he had expected another answer to come from Connor. Uncertainty perhaps, even downright refusal.

“Oh. Well, great.” And then he smiles, wide and bright in the winter sunlight.

It doesn’t take long for Connor to move in. He doesn’t need to pack a case or hire a truck to move his furniture, most of what he had belonged to CyberLife. Most of it only really existed in the abstract - lines of code that fluttered behind his closed eyes. Sometimes he still thinks of Amanda, and her roses.

As days and weeks dawn on the world where androids have begun to achieve some kind of parity with humans, the authorities continue to rule confusingly with regards to android rights. Connor sits on Hank’s sofa and watches Markus in further talks with President Christina Warren, his mismatched eyes filled with fury in his knotted brow. Why can’t we just keep it simple? He asks, steady and angry. She replies in a sweet, falsely delicate tone. Well, Mr Manfred. It just isn’t simple. 

All he wants is for androids to be treated with the same rights as humans, and honestly, Connor thinks that is really the simplest thing in the world.

So in the absence of much guidance from the government and even less from what remains of CyberLife, Fowler allows Connor to keep his position at the DPD. 

Once the decision has been made, he calls Connor into his glass bubble of an office to explain the situation to him. “You can keep working with Lieutenant Anderson,” he says, “Or I can reassign you, whatever you want.” Fowler has a particular, stern way of speaking to Connor that is difficult for him to read. He has always found human emotions to be a strange, tangled web, one that he wasn’t concerned with personally unravelling until deviancy began to untie each line of his own code with its bright fingers. 

When Fowler speaks, Connor feels a certain warmth beneath the initial curtness. He’s kind, Connor decodes. He wants me to be happy, but he doesn’t know how.

Connor tries to imagine working on cases without Hank by his side. Impossible.

“I’d like to keep working with Lieutenant Anderson.”

“Fine. That’s fine.” Fowler nods, and Connor is dismissed.

Hank is waiting for them at their adjacent desks. Over the past few weeks, Hank has torn down the anti-android paraphernalia that he had stuck up around his workspace. He’s also removed the articles about the Red Ice Squad, articles which Connor rather liked perusing when Hank was in the bathroom or the break room and he could be certain that he wasn’t being watched. There’s something pleasant about seeing photos of Hank from years ago, even if Connor can’t put his finger on exactly what it is that he likes about them. The transformation, perhaps. Skin becoming lined, beard greyed. The passage of time.

In the absence of these bits and pieces, Hank’s desk looks blank - as if he’s planning to start over but doesn’t know quite where to begin. Of course it’s all a very neat metaphor for the world outside.

“What’d he say?” Hank asks, almost knocking over his coffee as Connor takes a seat across from him.

“He asked me if I wanted to be reassigned,” Connor says, switching on his terminal and watching the screen as it flickers to life.

“Oh,” Hank’s face falls slightly, and Connor feels something twist sharply inside him. He feels bad for him. “Right.”

“I said I didn’t want to be.” Connor smiles at Hank and he hopes that the expression is reassuring. Post-deviation, he’s learning the intricacies of human expressions, not just how to read them, but how to perform them as well. “I’d like to keep working with you, Lieutenant.”

Hank returns his smile and Connor is glad of it.

“You’re gonna get sick of me,” Hank gives a self-deprecatory laugh before turning to his own terminal and squinting at the display in front of him. “Living with me. Working with me.” Connor wonders whether the words are flippant or whether there is actually some genuine fear behind them, worry that Connor will grow tired of him in the days to come. That same sympathy for Hank rolls once more in his chest. He wants to voice the impossibility of his world without Hank, but he cannot think of the right words. 

“We’ll see.” Is what he decides on in the end, and perhaps it’s the wrong thing, because Hank laughs, the sound a little mean, low in his throat. Silence extends between them for nine minutes.

Although the world is shifting around them, making space for the new, there are hard kernels that have dug themselves so deeply into society that they cannot be uprooted, no matter the strength of the earth shaking around them. Androids still go missing, humans still get murdered. Every morning there are new cases waiting at their terminals, new lines of data and cases to be cracked. Fowler assigns them a lot of homicide cases. It is something quite incredible, this capability that people have - both androids and humans, now androids have been granted their own semblance of personhood - to be cruel to one another. 

Hank and Connor are very good at their jobs. Hank doesn’t like to talk about it, but Connor has no qualms about discussing their successes with others at the precinct. He understands about human modesty, but then again, he’s not a human. Reed, still employed, still reluctant to work with androids, asks Connor to remove his “shit-eating grin” on more than one occasion. Connor reminds him that androids do not eat, and if they did, it’s unlikely that they would consume faeces.

Together they interrogate a pair of suspects - one android, one human - on a double murder charge. Connor watches through the two way mirror as Hank interviews one of the key witnesses, a scared teenage girl with hands that shake like leaves around the cup of water that he brings her. His voice is low and gentle and Connor feels his programming whirr, almost without his knowledge, to store the words deep inside him. 

With Hank’s guidance, the girl manages to come up with enough evidence for them to catch both of the perpetrators. Connor is proud. He does not tell Hank this. 

On an icy morning in February, the ground covered in several inches of fresh show, they uncover the ruined bodies of two android children in the back of an abandoned car. Following the discovery, Connor finds his LED stuttering in and out of red and yellow for the rest of the day. He’s not sure why. 

The work isn’t easy, to suggest as much would be doing a disservice to the pair of them. But it is companionable, they move easily around each other, their routines falling into step.

Where Hank had been worried about Connor getting sick of him, the opposite seems to be the case. Connor finds himself running scans to keep tabs on Hank, the thrum of his heartbeat, the hours he has spent in restful, productive sleep. He’s not really sure how to qualify these extra processes - but he supposes Hank is very important to him now, to his livelihood outside the constraints of his machinery. Connor cares.

It’s March now, and a red sun rises over Detroit, a heavy, dark disc in the pale sky. Connor watches the horizon, as the light touches the roofs of the neighbourhood and spreads over the scrub of Hank’s front yard. Frost twists the grass into sharp peaks.

The light feels heavy, although Connor knows that light, as a spectrum, has no weight to it. He wonders if it will snow today. 

Hank has been getting better at waking up on time - mostly with Connor’s consistent reminders and an extra cup of coffee. By the time they leave the house that morning, Connor internal display shows a time only twenty minutes later than they should ideally be arriving at the precinct. It’s not good by most people’s standards, but Connor considers it a victory. 

Fowler greets them with a face like thunder. He’s never said as much, but Connor can tell that the complications around android crimes are taking their toll on him. 

“Anderson, Connor, in here.” He barks, beckoning the two of them through the plate glass doors of his office. Connor stands.

“Jesus, Jeff - no time for coffee?” Connor can tell from Hank’s tone that he is half-joking, but Fowler doesn’t seem to be taking kindly to any lightness in Hank’s words this morning. Connor watches as Fowler’s stress level rises a spike or two. 

“You can drink coffee on your own time, _Lieutenant._ ” The choice of Hank’s title is heavy and deliberate, and Hank shrugs. 

“Fine.”

Hank shuts the door behind them, shutting out the low babble that echoes in from the main floor. Fowler settles himself heavily behind his desk, his expression clearly showing that he is not prepared to sugarcoat his words today. “You remember those android kids we found last month?”

At Fowler’s words, Connor’s archive accesses his memories of the scene. It’s an involuntary action and the sudden flash of images before his eyes makes his LED turn from blue to red and back again in quick, sparking succession. The damaged faces, the narrow, white limbs, all crowded together against the torn backseat of the car. Connor has not been programmed with any paternal or even familial instinct, so he can’t explain why that particular crime scene has had such a lasting effect on him. 

Connor can feel Hank watching him. He hopes that he won’t ask any questions about this.

“We got a lead on where they came from. Forensics managed to pull something out of one of their trackers.” Fowler turns towards his terminal, pulling up a series of maps that blink blue-grey lines and red dots across the main screen. “Here.” 

An address appears alongside one of the markers. Connor processes it: an abandoned warehouse, just outside of the city limits. It seems almost too apt, like something from the plot of one of those old action movies that Hank likes to watch in the evenings. 

“We need another pair to stake it out.” 

Hank shakes his head in disbelief. Even if Connor didn’t have the ability to scan Hank’s body for changes in his heart rate and overall stress level, he would still be able to sense the tightening of his shoulders, see the single step he takes to narrow the gap between himself and the desk. “Jeff - we haven’t even been working on this case.”

“Chen and Miller are already on it. We need more people.” Fowler’s face is dangerously calm.

“More people to sit outside an empty warehouse?”

Connor knows that the two men have a lot of respect for each other, grudging as it may often be, and their eye contact is drawn as sharp as a blade. Hank will defer to Fowler’s superior rank eventually, but it's not in his nature to do so without a fight. 

“What do you think, Connor?” Fowler asks, breaking eye contact with Hank and in turn, the uncomfortable silence that had settled itself between them. 

Connor considers the question for a moment. On the one hand, he knows that Hank is reluctant to take part in a stakeout - for reasons that Connor has not yet completely ascertained - and Connor wants Hank to be happy. On the other hand, Connor knows that often an increased workforce can raise the likelihood of a crime being solved, and alongside that, the images of the discarded android children play like spectres at the edges of his mind.

“I think,” Connor starts, his gaze trained deliberately on Fowler. He doesn’t want to see Hank’s reaction. “I think I’d like to catch whoever did this.”

“Good.” Fowler looks content as he leans back in his chair. “I’ll send you the files.”

Hank’s expression is far from happy - his gaze heavy beneath his brow - but he leaves without argument. 

They spend the next few days preparing for the stakeout, poring over maps of the warehouse, floor plans and blueprints that highlight where the damaged androids could be coming from, old search warrants that indicate the empty state of the building over the past few weeks. The perpetrators and the purpose are as yet unidentified, so Connor catalogues every piece of information presented to them, certain that something useful will present itself eventually. It has to. Tina Chen, with dark purple shadows under her eyes, thanks them for offering their help: “eighteen hours a day is a lot for two people.” Hank doesn’t divulge his initial reluctance. 

The warehouse sits on the banks of the Detroit river, empty windows gaping like wide eyes looking out over the black water. Connor cannot see it, but he knows that Belle-Isle is not far, its existence no longer illuminated by the shining silver monolith of CyberLife tower. The thought makes reminders and memories crackle through him, and he does his very best to damp them down, because he knows that spending time dwelling on something that happened many months ago is not going to help him utilise his programming to its fullest capabilities. 

They take Hank’s car, far more inconspicuous than any police issue vehicle, and pull it up outside the warehouse. A sign on the red brick facade reads “Detroit Engine Parts”, the lettering so chipped and worn that Connor has to complete a scan in order to be certain of the full name. He estimates that the warehouse has been out of use for more than two decades. 

“So much for Motor City, huh?” Hank comments, pulling up the handbrake and letting the roar of the car’s engine drop into silence. 

They’ve agreed to a night shift, giving Tina and Chris some respite from their near constant surveillance of the building. The sun sets slowly behind the buildings, pulling long shadows across the concrete parking lots, throwing the cracked upper windows of the warehouses into opaque relief - gold and yellow and deep red. Connor sits quietly, allows his processors to rifle methodically through the existing information about the warehouse that he has stored, in case any anomalies flag now they are on site. 

Darkness falls, uneventful. 

“Fuck, it’s cold.” Hank mutters, blows warm air into his cupped hands. “Thought it was meant to be spring.”

Connor nods. Although he does not feel the cold, he can sense the near sub-zero temperatures and comprehend how they might be uncomfortable for a human to endure. Hank’s body temperature is sitting within a normal range, however, which suggests that he is commenting on the weather to make conversation, rather than to express that he views himself to be in any danger. 

“There’s an area of low pressure moving over the city,” Connor states after a moment, blinking the Michigan weather map out of his vision.

“I don’t know what that means, Connor.”

“It means the weather is bad.”

Hank tilts his head to one side, eyes still trained ahead. “Yeah, no shit.”

Silence falls again. Connor can sense that there is something that Hank wants to say; his body language is not relaxed, his fingers drum an inconsistent pattern against his knee. Midnight comes and goes before he speaks. A great wheel of stars opens up in the sky above them. 

“They bother you, don’t they?” Hank asks, finally.

“Excuse me?”

“The android kids. They bother you.” Hank spreads his hands, a vague gesture. “More than other android victims.”

Connor thinks for a moment, considers how, on the day they had first been discovered, he had been unable to stop his LED from spiralling out of its cycle of warning yellow and panicked red; how Fowler’s mention of them had caused long-catalogued images to pop up unbidden in his field of vision.

“I suppose so.” 

“Yeah.” Hank nods. “Me too.”

Connor remembers. The sharp smell of alcohol, six silver barrels. A framed photograph.

Two weeks pass before anything happens. Connor and Hank spend five nights a week sitting in Hank’s car, sunset to sunrise, watching the warehouse’s anonymous exterior. Hank drinks coffee from a flask and Connor can tell from his increasingly restless energy that he is beginning to view this whole thing as a pointless activity. Deviancy gives Connor the inclination to agree, but his duty to Captain Fowler keeps him returning to the stakeout night after night. He thinks that Hank must be driven by some similar loyalty.

As Hank pulls up the car and locks the handbrake, something sparks sharply inside Connor. A warning sign, sweeping through him like the narrow, singular beam from a lighthouse. 

“Something is different,” he says. Hank turns to look at him, the blue in his eyes as sharp and clear as cut glass. 

“What is it?”

Connor doesn’t answer, focusing instead on the warehouse, trying to push past the red brick, into those vast empty spaces where he can sense something - someone? - moving. Trying to gather data at this distance is like holding water in cupped hands, silvery lines that slip through his fingers.

“There’s someone inside.”

“Are you sure?”

Connor checks again, but he doubts that the likelihood, flashing in his vision at almost ninety percent, will change. In the most distant reaches of his sensors, a shadowy figure crackles like static. 

“I’m sure,” he nods.

“Jesus Christ - well, what the fuck are we waiting for?” Hank pockets the car keys, his left hand already reaching for the door, the other sliding inside his jacket for his gun. 

“Wait, wait. Hank.” Preconstructions spin before Connor’s eyes like zoetrope slides, too fast to comprehend the risk behind any of them, or to separate those with the highest probability of success. Neither of them have enough information about the situation to sensibly advance, but Connor can sense the rise in Hank’s heart rate, the sudden course of adrenaline rushing through him. 

“We’ve been waiting for two weeks!” Hank hisses. “And Chen’s been waiting god knows how much longer - we might not get another chance.” And before Connor’s hand can find Hank’s shoulder, to coolly impart his words of logic and warning, the car door is open and Hank is stepping out into the night air.

Almost automatically, he sends an alert through to the precinct, details of their position, the vague and potentially dangerous situation that they find themselves in. Then, he does the thing that comes to him more naturally than any automated programme. He follows Hank.

The interior of the warehouse is easy to access - most of the doors have long since fallen in on their hinges and those that are still standing have no locks on them. It sets Connor on edge, the ease with which they find themselves in the vast, empty belly of the building, dark save for the slanting beams of moonlight that filters in through the roof, wide, unevenly spaced gaps framing clear slices of the night sky. It’s eerily quiet. Connor can hear the rustling of birds high up in the rafters, but no other noise aside from the sound of Hank’s footsteps on the uneven floor, strewn with abandoned planks and heaped cubes of concrete.

Connor keeps Hank in his focus, his figure highlighted in bright lines. It takes more effort to hold Hank’s presence alongside his other processes - routine scans of the building, communication with the precinct - but Connor can’t imagine leaving Hank unobserved. It tangibly lowers his own stress level, having the illuminated form shimmering in the corner of his eye. It doesn’t make sense, why an action not directly linked to his self-imposed mission of **EXPLORE WAREHOUSE** would make him feel more comfortable, but there’s not much space or process left to question it. 

He pulls up the warehouse blueprints, comparing them with the current environment. It’s not exactly a complex building, but Connor can deduce that, for whatever reason, recent changes have been made to the structure. The skeleton of a staircase lines one wall, metal spokes sticking out from the red brick. It used to lead up to an extra room - an office, perhaps - and to a thin gallery of flooring that ran a few metres below the perimeter of the roof. 

“Connor? What do you have?” Hank’s voice breaks through, coming from a spot approximately fifteen metres to his right. He sounds nervous, all his vitals slightly elevated into a state of tension.

“Not much.” Connor takes a few steps closer and clears the floor plans from his vision, letting Hank become his primary point of focus once again. A broad band of moonlight throws his face into high relief, casting shadows that exaggerate the concerned line of his brow.

“You said there was someone inside?” If Hank’s hands were not holding his gun out before him, cradled in a loose fighter stance, Connor knows that they would be wildly gesturing, as if to say: _well? Where the fuck are they?_

Connor scans the surroundings again. Shadows and sharp sparks of light blur across his vision, but nothing of much use until… until. His sensors register a flurry of movement, stronger now, like a camera flashing in the periphery of his vision. He reaches out for it again and the presence flutters once more, its structure solid white, opaque. No body heat. An android, then.

Somewhere close by.

The signal could be coming from anywhere in the building, but Connor’s optical input doesn’t register anything nearby apart from a few discarded crates, dusty rubble and Hank’s figure. Hell, you don’t have to be an android to realise that they are the only beings in the warehouse - doubtless Hank has already figured that one out.

Nothing to either side of them, nowhere to go above them.

The realisation dawns on Connor like the breaking of a wave, pulling tight within him and then crashing down hard, sudden and explosive. 

“Hank. Under the building. There’s a basement.”

Hank turns quickly to face him, and Connor can sense his expression, even in the darkness.

“Why didn’t you…” Hank stops himself. When they’d first met, worked together, he certainly would have complained, Connor knows that much - _Why didn’t you tell me before? Why didn’t I already know this?_ But he doesn’t. He waits for Connor to continue. The gesture makes a single line of data flare through his systems, hot to the touch. 

“I didn’t realise. I was focused on other things.” Like keeping Hank’s figure in his focus, outlined like it were the piece of data most important to solving their case. At the time, he wasn’t sure why he elected to use a portion of his processors on something he knows would not be considered in any way pivotal to the case’s solution. He’s still not sure.

“Fine - doesn’t matter now.” Hank doesn’t ask any further questions and Connor finds himself intensely glad about this. “How do we get down there?”

He opens the blueprints again, which do indeed show another staircase leading down, this time completely removed, nothing left behind to show that it ever existed at all. 

“I don’t know.” The feeling of failure is heavy and tangible, spreading thick through Connor. It’s painful to admit that he doesn’t have an answer right away, but Hank seems to appreciate these admittances of uncertainty as one of Connor’s more human attributes. It’s a delicate balance for Connor to strike.

Hank grins; Connor registers another flood of adrenaline surge through him. “Let’s find out then.”

They advance slowly, tentatively. Connor monitors the space around them, holding on tight to that white flash of movement, which grows stronger with every step.

At the edge of his mind, Hank’s heartbeat is very fast.

Without warning, there’s a sound from under them. Connor feels his LED spiral once, steady yellow pushed into a sudden shock of red. The noise cracks through their silence like the sharpness of a whip, far too close to be attached to the android that Connor is tracking. It sounds like it has echoed from the dusty space between them. Connor directs his focus between his feet and it’s suddenly like he’s standing above the night sky, staring into a void beneath the uneven build up of planks under the soles of his shoes. 

“It’s right below us,” he whispers, and his voice is small. “The basement.”

Hank opens his mouth to reply, but no words come.

A tautness in the air. A sound like a thunderclap. 

The floor gives way beneath them.

Connor remembers falling; he knows it. He remembers it from his very first successful mission, the plummeting sensation, the thankless knowledge of an inevitable destruction. The thing that he had been unable to identify then, but that he knows now was the beginning of fear, a hard seed buried deep inside the casing of his heart. The turning and dropping of a stomach that he doesn’t have.

Luckily, the fall is far shorter than he recalls that of all those months past. Really, he knows that luck has nothing to do with it, there’s still the same emptiness, a brief weightlessness that starts in his feet and spreads to his fingers, to his throat in a sickening rush. Dank air streaking past him, the spin and clench of his systems as they take a fraction of a second to register what is happening - and then the impact of the rough ground beneath him. If he were human, he knows he would register pain in numerous parts of his body. 

If he were human. Hank.

“Hank?”

Connor’s processors, slightly rattled from the sensation of the fall, take a long moment to catch up. It’s very dark, and even with the holes that have opened up in the ceiling above them, Connor has to scan the area in order to see anything at all. In the darkness, he registers two very separate figures. One, close by, familiar, outlined in yellow, the other a solid white that has become humanoid in shape with his new proximity to it. It moves, only ten metres further from him than Hank is. He permits his systems to give him mission objectives for both points of focus and they appear suddenly before his eyes, bright and confusing: **STAY WITH HANK** plays **PURSUE SUSPECT**. Indecision freezes him. 

But above all that, lingering like an omen, dark and serious, is another warning. He is given no option to act upon it, but there it is.

**HANK IS HURT.**

He doesn’t need to be able to see to know the signs of a body in trauma - a nervous system lit up like a city from the sky, a heart beating out of its usual steady rhythm. Connor can sense the shaking of Hank’s muscles from here, smell the cold sharpness of his sweat, the sourness of what he knows is blood.

“Connor!” Hank’s voice is wrecked, each syllable punched from his lungs as though they cost him a deep, physical effort.

Connor moves towards him - a desperate crawl on his hands and knees. There’s more than enough room to stand in here, judging by the distance that they fell there’s about six metres of dark air between them and the floor of the warehouse. But Connor’s body seems unwilling to cooperate, standing cool and calm and walking towards Hank does not present itself as a possibility. The ground is rough beneath him, littered with splintered wood that doesn’t pierce the illusion of his skin. 

Closer now, he scans Hank properly - a vivid point of impact shines on his right ankle, shattered damage spreading up to the ball of his hip. Although Connor cannot see, he knows that Hank’s tibia bone has broken, and at this angle is likely to have torn clear through the skin. Scarlet on white. Connor does not feel nauseated as a human might, by the prospect of blood and bone, but the thought of Hank’s pain rips through him like a lightning strike. 

He knows that he is not equipped to see to Hank’s injuries, but his hand is at Hank’s shoulder, the side of his face. His fingers feel for his expression, tight with pain.

Out of the corner of his eye, movement, a brief scuffling followed by the unmistakable sound of footsteps. **PURSUE SUSPECT** blinks sharply at him. The time in which it will be useful to perform this action is rapidly running out. 

“Hank. They’re leaving-” Connor says, and he’s taken aback by what he hears in his own voice. Emotion. Fear. It courses with every uneven beat of Hank’s heart.

“Fuck,” The word comes from Hank as little more than a groan. “Connor. Go.”

“What?” The memory of a rooftop and the smell of lavender. A survival percentage, flickering below ninety. Hank’s warm hand in his own.

“Go after them! I’ll be fine, just-” Hank shifts slightly and his voice cracks right down the middle, throwing a shadow of doubt over his well-intentioned words. “I’m not fucking going anywhere.”

So despite everything that screams at him to stay, Connor goes. He returns his focus as best he can to the glimmering white objective in right-hand side of his vision and tunnels in on it, willing the closest thing he has to a subconscious to take over. If he knew how to believe in a god, he knows he would send a prayer for Hank’s safety. And then for his own success. In that order.

He hears his own footsteps as he runs, a mechanical, familiar rhythm. Hank. Hank. Hank.

The chase leads him through a narrow corridor lined with wooden buttresses, pitch dark without any of the moonlight filtering down from the space above them. There are no decisions to make, no obstacles to overcome, simply a blinkered pursuit of the shining figure before him. A rush through his systems that makes his LED spin red without faltering. The floor begins to rise at a sharp angle beneath his feet until they are no longer underground, released from a jagged hole in the earth into the crispness of the night air. 

The android stops. Connor stops too, a few metres from them. He knows now that without any obstacles in their way, they probably could have run all night, a tireless, perfectly matched hunt. He allows his processors to spread themselves wide again, out of that focused blackness that comes with a chase, and he registers the reason that the other android has stopped.

Blue and red lights, wheeling in the air. The hiss of a voice through a loudspeaker, telling them that they are surrounded. Telling them to stop or they will be shot. Connor knows that the last threat doesn’t apply to him. 

He recognises Tina’s face in the crowd of police officers, her grin shining like the half moon.

From that point onward, everything seems to happen very quickly. The android is a model that Connor recognises as an ST300, the kind that before the revolution would sit behind reception desks and smile benignly at customers. Now her face is pained, features lined with an incredible emotion that Connor has rarely seen on anyone’s face before - android or human. Has his face ever looked like that? She raises her hands and one of the officers steps forward to place cuffs around her wrists. 

Fowler is amongst the crowd as well, plain clothed, presumably dragged from his home by Connor’s warning messages. He approaches Connor with a weary, thankful smile.

“Good job, Connor.” And then, calling up that which makes Connor’s entire being flood with the emotion that is resting just below the surface - “where’s Anderson?” 

“Lieutenant Anderson is hurt. He told me to leave him.” Connor tries to keep his voice as professional as possible, unwavering. He’s only partly successful. “There was a false floor in part of the warehouse and we fell through it - that was where we found the suspect.”

Fowler runs a hand over his face and the gesture makes uncertainty spike in Connor’s chest.

“Should I have done something differently?”

“I don’t know.” Fowler shrugs and gives him another tired smile. “Maybe. Let’s get him, shall we?”

Ambulances arrive and Connor directs the paramedics under the ground, giving them the directions to retrace his own steps into the space underneath the warehouse. He imagines Hank by himself in the darkness. Alone with his pain. The image is one that he wishes he had never constructed. 

Twenty minutes later - nineteen minutes, thirty-five seconds, by the anxious ticking of Connor’s internal clock - the paramedics return with a stretcher balanced between them. Connor finds himself at his side before he knows it, noting the pale shine of Hank’s face in the moonlight. 

“I should have stayed with you.” Connor says. Something tells him to reach for Hank’s hand and hold it tight, as if the press of skin on skin will bring some stillness to the stuttering inside him. It brings no calm however, and Hank’s skin is cool to his touch. He squeezes Connor’s fingers briefly, one quick motion before his hand falls back, loose against his side. 

“I told you not to.” Hank’s eyes are half-closed, his voice strained.

“I should have known. I should have known not to leave you.”

Hank shakes his head. 

“Don’t. Don’t do that. I’m the one who-” Connor follows Hank’s eye line, down his body to the mess at the end of the gurney. Hank’s right shin is rent in two, bone cracked from beneath his skin. “Fucking shit.”

Connor imagines his insides - white, soft grey, glowing lines of blue - against Hank’s, red and purple, a deep maw of a wound. He remembers the press of Hank’s fingers, curling around his own.

The medical team carry him into the ambulance. His face, if possible, seems to pale even further as they manoeuvre the stretcher into the back and crowd around him, assessing what needs to be done next. Connor tries to focus in on one voice at a time, to enlighten himself more as to what is going on, but it’s impossible to concentrate. Words pile on top of each other like a stack of cards.

“Connor?” Fowler is at his side, watching him as he watches the doors of the ambulance close. He wonders if Fowler can see the sadness that crackles through him at the sight, for surely it must light up each one of his wires like a beacon. But perhaps not. He continues to speak.

“We’re going to take the android down to the precinct for questioning.”

“Would you like me to come?” Connor asks as the ambulance pulls away, the wail of sirens piercing through the darkness. He scans the plates - registered to Henry Ford Hospital. Fowler shakes his head.

“Reckon Chen’s got a whole book of questions she could ask about this whole thing. Unless… you want to?”

Connor imagines it, sitting in the observation room, watching as Tina and Chris pull information from the suspect. I don’t want to, he thinks. “I think Tina will do an excellent job,” is what he says, and Fowler nods his agreement.

“Hank’ll be okay,” he continues, and his hand twitches at his side as if he’s considering laying it on Connor’s shoulder in a show of solidarity, or perhaps of comfort. “Not the first time an officer’s been wounded on the job. They’ll patch him up at Henry Ford.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Are you worried?” Fowler asks. 

“I don’t really experience worry,” Connor replies, but there’s a tightness in his gut that seems to indicate the contrary. “With the correct medical care, the percentage chance of a good recovery from a tibial break is relatively high.”

“Right. Just what I was going to say.” Fowler gives him a tight lipped smile and Connor can tell that he is joking.

They stand together for a moment. Officers are illuminating police lines around them, staking out the area, designating the place a crime scene - for although the crime itself isn’t yet known, the possibility of finding it now sits well within their reach.

“I need to head back,” Fowler says at last. “Figure out what else needs to be done here.”

“Where should I go?” Connor’s vaguely aware of how pathetic the question sounds. Sometimes he misses the drive that has been consumed by his deviancy, the never ending press of objectives to be fulfilled. Not often, but in times like this, where an empty dread spreads through him.

“Home?” Fowler’s brow furrows. “You could go to the hospital, but it’s the middle of the night and I don’t know how much help you’ll be. We’ll need you in the morning to talk about this.” He glances at his watch - Connor registers the time as just past three in the morning - and exhales slowly. “In a few hours, I guess.”

Fowler watches him for a beat. “You’ll be alright?” The implication is there; neither of them need to say it. _You’ll be alright without Hank?_

Connor nods. In absence of anything else and taking on board Fowler’s suggestions, objectives flash before his eyes: **GO HOME** and **ENTER STASIS (TIME?)** and then, blinking alongside them, for the not too distant future: **GO TO THE PRECINCT**. 

So he does as Fowler suggests. He knows that Hank’s car is on the other side of the warehouse, but he also knows that the keys are in his jacket pocket, moving further away from him with every passing second. For a long moment, he doesn’t know what to do. 

In an involuntary response, **CALL A TAXI** flashes across his internal display. Obviously.

* * *

When the taxi pulls up outside Hank’s house - their house, Connor thinks - a while later, the sky is still dark. The darkest part of the day, heavy and blue, before the birds have begun to awaken in the trees, before lights have started to click on inside windows. He can hear the faint buzzing of a street lamp, the lapping of the water that runs behind the house. It should be calming, this impression of a world asleep, but Connor can’t help but feel a nervous energy prickling at the back of his neck, raising the artificial hairs that rest there.

How can he be calm?

He lets himself into the house, which sits just as they left it. Of course. Why would the house have changed just because Hank is not here?

“Hello, Sumo.” He flicks on the main light. He doesn’t really need it to see, he’s certainly not going to walk into anything without it, but it fills the space with a low, comforting glow. For a moment, everything seems less silent.

Sumo trots over to him and presses his warm, wet nose into the back of Connor’s knee. He gives a small huff, half greeting, half questioning, and Connor knows exactly what he’s saying.

“Hank’s not here right now.” Sumo sits back on his haunches, his head tilted to one side. “He’ll be back later.” Sumo makes a noise, as if contented with Connor’s response, and a spark of guilt darts through him. What scruples have entered his programming that he feels bad, lying to a dog?

He scoops a handful of food into Sumo’s bowl. “It’s not really breakfast time yet, you know. But I won’t tell Hank if you don’t.” 

As Sumo eats, Connor turns to face the rest of the house, the dimly lit living room, the dark corridor that leads to the rest of the house. Hank’s bedroom, the door left open ajar. 

Reconstructions appear at every turn, breaking through and crackling in every reach of his vision.

He sees Hank in the kitchen, knife in hand as he chops an onion into thick strips, his fingers clumsy. _Gimme a break, it’s been a few years._ The sharp smell that should bring tears to Connor’s eyes, if his systems were capable of such a reaction. _My ma used to cut onions with sunglasses on._ Hank’s smile, wide and easy, that little gap between his two front teeth.

Connor thinks too about the neat, sleek revolver that he’d first seen on the kitchen floor, only inches from Hank’s slackened fingers, now locked away in one of the drawers of Hank’s dresser.

He moves to sit on the sofa and the image of Hank sits down beside him, placing a bowl of chips on the table before them. His hair is still wet from the shower, curling at his temples; the scent of the damp skin at his neck fresh and close. _Gears to win? What’d your statistics tell you?_ Hank’s low laugh, a hand clapped onto Connor’s shoulder. He knows that beneath his shirt, beneath his jacket, his skin can peel back to reveal the memory of Hank’s touch, five fingers pressed there in white and blue.

The bedroom. The door that Hank disappears behind every evening, leaving Connor alone in the empty dark of the living room. He knows how to enter stasis with the sound of Hank’s steady breathing in his head, only metres away, a sound as calm as the rush and drag of waves upon the shore.

It’s too much. Layers and layers of data begin to pile unsteadily on top of each other until Connor can feel his systems positively creaking beneath the weight of it all, lines of code bending together until they become warped enough to snap. He had thought that he would be fine. After all, he’s coped without Hank before - he entered this world without him, and there were times in the past year when he had fully expected that he would leave it without him too. He remembers the snow, Amanda’s tough, disappointed gaze. 

Perhaps it’s not as easy as all that. His existence, intended to be solitary and efficient, has been changed irrevocably. 

He cannot be here without Hank. He cannot sit and wait and imagine. If he does, then these walls, papered thick with memories in only a few months, will close like a vice around him. 

A hard line burns through his chest, thick and bright white, sweeping across his vision. He has not been built to feel pain, but he knows it, flickering high and hot in the furthest reaches of his mind. He cannot cry, either, but sitting here in Hank’s empty house, with Hank unreachable, so many miles away, he would like to be able to. He would like to be able to take deep breaths to calm himself, to meter the panic that is rising in his throat.

He allows his systems to take over. They falter to begin with, uncertain, but eventually something comes to catch him, like the tightening in a slack piece of rope. It feels like an emergency protocol has been activated, red warning barriers that only come into play in the event of imminent danger. 

A mission statement appears, clear in his vision. It wipes out everything else, his missions from the hours before fall to the wayside. The only solution to the crackling burn inside him.

**BE WITH HANK.**

And behind it, imposed like a watermark, a map of his journey to Henry Ford Hospital. So it’s decided.

“Sumo?” He stands, and Sumo turns his baleful gaze towards him. “I’m going to go and see Hank. I’ll send a message to Detective Collins. He likes you. He’ll come and see you later.” Connor knows full well that the dog can’t understand him, but it feels comforting to verbally unload some of his intentions. In reply, Sumo gives a soft whine and turns back to his bowl.

The ride to the hospital doesn’t take very long, but Connor can’t stop his internal clock from ticking down each minute, his navigation systems from following each turn in the road. When he arrives, the sun has long since crept its way over the horizon, the sky around the edges of the building glowing a sweet, pale yellow.

He’s greeted at the front desk by a young-looking android with brown hair and clear, mismatched eyes. Markus’ influence, perhaps. No LED spins at their temple, although that is not such an uncommon sight these days. 

“How can I help you?” They give Connor a pleasant, professional smile.

“I’m here to see someone who was admitted early this morning? Hank Anderson?”

“Do you have any further authorisation?”

“Yes.” Connor sparks up a connection between them sends over a description of Hank, his injury and where the ambulances would have arrived from. The android nods at the information and sits quietly for a moment. Even without the yellow wheel of an LED, Connor can almost see the hospital records flashing before their eyes. 

“Mr Anderson is in surgery at the moment.”

The words make Connor’s insides sway uneasily. 

“Oh.”

“I would advise you to come back later.” 

Clearly something on Connor’s face illuminates the fact that, for him, leaving is simply not an option. 

“Or - would you like to wait? It could be a while.”

Connor nods. Honestly, he doesn’t care how long he has to wait. The android tilts their head to one side, a look on their face that Connor can’t help but read as slightly pitying.

“If you give me your name, I’ll let you know when we hear something.”

The connection flickers up between them again.

“Take a seat.”

So he does. He takes a seat in the corner of the quiet waiting area, and he does just that - waits. He tries valiantly to quieten the incessant ticking of his internal clock, but it’s nearly impossible to turn it off altogether and it continues to linger in the corner of his vision, reminding him of each passing hour. Connor has never found that he gets bored particularly easily. On heavier days at the precinct he is able to occupy himself with paperwork for long stretches at a time; even on the stakeout with Hank, dark, empty hours stretched out before them, he found processes to keep himself busy. 

But here, things are different. He watches people come and go: families of humans, single androids who are coolly redirected to the newly opened Android Maintenance Wing. People carry bunches of silk flowers, boxes of clothes, dogeared books. It’s difficult to concentrate on any one thing for too long. He sends messages to Fowler and Collins, mostly to have something to do. His coin rolls in and out of his fingers, catching the light in anxious, flickering sparks. 

Around six that evening - Connor registers that he has been sitting here for more than nine hours - a nurse approaches him. She’s human, wearing teal green scrubs and clutching a stack of files to her chest. She gives him tired, unassuming smile. 

“Are you Connor?”

“Yes,” Connor gets to his feet. A little too quickly, probably. 

“Mr Anderson is out of surgery now.” Connor can feel his LED spin a single yellow round, clear and nervous. “He’s been admitted to our high dependency unit.”

“Can I see him?”

“He’s not awake just yet.” Connor isn’t sure how to tell her that that doesn’t matter to him at all. Just his knowing he’s safe, the steady reality of his presence, would be enough. Evidently this shows across his face because she continues, laying one hand against Connor’s elbow. “But - sure. Come with me.”

As she leads him through the hospital, and up in a crowded elevator to one of the higher floors, Connor realises that he’s never been in a hospital before. Until after the revolution, android and human care was strictly separated - and still is, in a lot of states. There is a steady, staid coolness in the whole building that makes him feel uneasy, a sharp beeping accompanied only by the low, unrelenting hum of machinery. If he weren’t so focused on Hank, he knows it would be the kind of environment that would be far too stimulating for him to spend much time in. He tries to close out the external stimuli and focus only on the mission at hand, which glimmers before him, unfinished: **BE WITH HANK**.

The nurse leads him further down a set of wide corridors to a group of rooms at the back of the hospital. 

“You can come in for a few minutes,” she says, and there is something incredibly tender etched into the lines of her face. “I’m afraid it can’t be any longer than that.”

Connor isn’t exactly sure why but he refrains from questioning her any further, sensing that she is doing him a great kindness by permitting him to see Hank at all. He knows that there are still many human professionals who would not view his emotional needs as anything remotely similar to their own.

The room is cool and bright, with a wide window that lets in the last of the day’s sunlight. Golden, honeyed, the bed is bathed in it. That same high beeping is here too, Connor can pull the noise up along a scan of Hank’s vitals - heart rate, the mercifully even flow of his respiration.

Hank.

His objective glints again in his vision, turns once and wheels itself closed. Successful. He doesn’t feel the usual thrill of purpose that comes with completing a mission, far from it. He wishes it had never been a mission in the first place.

Hank is lying beneath crisp white bed sheets, dressed a pale patterned hospital gown that seems to drain all the colour from his features. Connor is so accustomed to seeing him in bright patterns, his features animated by an ever changing variety of human emotion, that to see him in such ashen repose sends a shock of emotion through him.

His face is turned away from the door so Connor has to imagine the sleeping stillness on his face, the kind that he has never seen. 

Hank’s right leg sticks out from beneath the bedclothes, raised at an angle, encased in three metal rings. He imagines the skin beneath the dressings, livid and raw, dark with incisions and thick black stitches - and under that, the bone, held precariously in place with pins and wires.

Connor does his best to reconstruct some of the things that must have happened to Hank between now and the moment when he left Connor at the warehouse all those hours ago. The very sight of him is enough to make Connor less capable, his processes more stunted. In the end, he gives up thinking about the past or the future, and simply stands and focuses himself into the present moment, monitoring the beats and intervals of Hank’s body.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave now.”

It’s the nurse, hovering in the doorway. She has the same stack of files in her hands, and Connor wonders how long she’s been standing there, watching him watch Hank. He doesn’t know how long has passed. There’s something sincerely apologetic in her voice, far surpassing the usual polite bedside manner.

“Of course.” Connor takes a final look at Hank. Tries to play some happy recollection over the sight of him, prone in the narrow bed, his vital signs played out in a series of impersonal, mechanical beeps.

The nurse leads him to a small room several floors below, a collection of worn out couches with their springs half-protruding through their seats. A low coffee table is strewn with an unappealing mixture of hospital leaflets and discarded paperbacks. Peeling letters on the glass panel of the door read 'Family Room'. 

“We can let you know if there are any developments,” she says, already halfway out of the door. “If you need to go home to sleep or... well, actually - I suppose that’s not a problem for you, is it?” She gives him a sheepish smile, and Connor decides not to extend her embarrassment any further by going into the intricacies of android stasis periods.

“Thank you.” 

And with a curt nod and the click of the door, she’s gone. 

The lounge provides Connor with far less visual input than the foyer downstairs. There is no steady stream of people to analyse, to wonder and make predictions about. Connor thinks briefly that wandering the corridors would be more interesting for him than just sitting and waiting. 

A few people float in and out, mostly to use the coffee machine in the corner of the room. They give him cursory glances, but say nothing, which Connor is glad of. He starts to tune them out after a while, until they’re just shapes creeping at the very edges of his vision. Normally such a lowering of his inhibitions would concern him, but he lets that feeling wash over him and past him, dismisses any warnings that flicker in his displays. 

In this way, hours pass. The sky outside turns properly dark, and overhead fluorescent lights flicker in to life, illuminating the room in a hard, blue-white sheen. People continue to come and go, less and less as the hours tick by into late evening, into night. Connor listens to the low hum of the cars on the road several stories below, the frequent wail of ambulance sirens.

“Connor?”

The sound of his name snaps him from his reverie, his half sleep. He expects to see another nurse, here perhaps to give him news about Hank, or else move him on to some other part of the hospital. 

But it’s not. A familiar figure stands in the doorway. 

“Captain Fowler.” At the sight of the police captain, Connor stands, willing all of his processors to snap back into action as quickly as possible. He can feel his LED spinning yellow, conspicuous and bright at his temple. 

“I called to check how Hank was doing. When I got here, they said he already had another visitor. Figured it was you.”

Fowler looks tired, wrung out, dark beneath the eyes and with more than just the start of a five o’clock shadow showing around his jaw. He sits down heavily on one of the sofas, indicating to Connor that he should do the same. 

“You didn’t come to the precinct,” Fowler says, undoing the top button of his shirt and loosening the knot of his tie.

At the words, a display pops up in front of Connor’s eyes. The is response mostly involuntary, as if something in his programming has been sparked into life - like human memory, pieces of data dredged up from the depths of his mind. **ARCHIVED MISSION // GO TO THE PRECINCT**. It had been there all along, tucked neatly behind more pressing matters, pulled out of importance by his need to be beside Hank.

“No. I didn’t.” Fowler regards him, not hard, or cool, simply curious. He doesn’t speak. Connor interprets that as his own cue to elaborate further.

“I meant to. I suppose that I-” he pauses for a second, grasping for the right word. “I forgot. My processes were focused elsewhere. They were focused on Lieutenant Anderson.”

“Is that your way of saying you were worried?”

“I think so.” It’s still difficult to match those bright abnormalities, those wide veins of humanity that bloom throughout his code, up with concrete words. How can a single, simple word, two syllables - worry - align with that wild flood of data, correspond with the feeling that everything inside him was sparking out of his control?

“I thought you didn’t experience worry?” Fowler asks, and Connor memory harks back to something that he said earlier that morning. Connor’s ability to track time is impeccable, but it still feels like a long, long time ago.

“I’m sorry.” Connor bows his head as he speaks; the feeling that registers inside him is far from easy, but he understands it. It’s shame, a hot wave of disappointment in himself. “I let it get in the way of what I was supposed to do.”

Fowler dismisses Connor’s apology with a flick of his hand. “Hell, we could’ve called if we’d needed you that badly. Chen got a confession out of her. Actually, in the end? I think she was pretty happy to talk.”

And Fowler explains, as briefly as he can - considering the dark beyond the window and the evident tiredness that lines every inch of his body. He explains the reasons for the android children, cracked and lifeless limbs locked up in the backseat of the car all those weeks ago.

“It was their code that they wanted.” He says, and the words make Connor’s throat feel very tight, all of a sudden. His own programming sparks momentarily, pushing his LED to wheel yellow. “The children’s programming. Whatever it is that makes the android children feel hunger, feel cold. They wanted that.”

“They wanted it?” 

Connor can see that Fowler is unsure of the technicalities of the case, especially when relaying information about androids to one of their own. The world changes and shifts with such velocity. “They wanted to use it. Implant it. Install it, she said, into adult androids so that they could have the same reactions: hunger, cold. I’ll send the transcript. You’ll understand it better than me.”

Connor imagines it, for a moment. Being able to feel hunger - taut like a knot of rope below his thirium pump - or cold - cool hands pressed flush against the inside of his chassis cover. He doesn’t see the appeal, exactly, but he can understand why an android might want to have the option of those sensations. To deepen the feeling of their own humanity. 

“It’s human.” Connor says. “I can understand that.”

A heartbeat passes. Human.

“Were there more children?” Connor asks. He can’t help but imagine the warehouse stacked with featureless bodies, smooth white plastic on smooth white plastic. 

Fowler shakes his head, and Connor feels a smooth sweep of relief run through him. “I don’t think so. The ST300 told us that the bodies in the car were unique, a mistake, they didn’t mean to hurt anyone. She seemed pretty remorseful about the whole thing.”

“That’s good.”

“Plus, there was more than just the section you and Anderson fell into.” Fowler continues. “There was a whole maze of rooms beneath that warehouse. They were accessing it from a point way off the plans - that’s why we never saw anyone go in or out.”

“I didn’t sense anything down there.”

Fowler shakes his head. “Because there wasn’t anything. People, androids, whoever, had been down there, but they’d cleared it all out. The ST300 was a scout, checking that we weren’t still following them after that tracker was found. But you got them.”

Connor smiles, and he feels the expression register as more than a little false. “We got them.”

Fowler seems unnerved by Connor’s reaction. He knows full well that there is an uncanny nature in android expressions that humans can find off putting, a reminder of the differences between them. Perhaps Connor just needs to practise more.

They sit in silence for a long moment. Connor files Fowler’s information away for later, for when he has to write up his and Hank’s part of the case. 

“Would you?” Fowler asks, before elaborating further, “would you want that - those human sensations? If you could?”

Connor considers his question for a moment. Too long a moment, evidently, because Fowler starts to speak again. “Didn’t mean to be too personal.”

The question is a touch personal, granted, but that has never concerned Connor too much.

“I don’t think so. I certainly wouldn’t harm anyone else for the experience of it,” Connor explains, doing his best to keep his voice level. “I like being an android.”

Fowler nods. “Fair enough.”

Connor listens to the street noise from below, the thrum of cars, that ever present scream of sirens. He can sense that the captain has more that he wants to say, so he allows him to mull over his words for a moment. 

“I spoke to a few of the doctors.” Fowler says finally, turning to him. In the low light, his face is very sincere. “Hank will be fine, you know that, don’t you?”

Connor nods, and his systems flicker to tell him that the reaction is forced, set apart from his normal reaction to a situation like this. It is a lie.

“What was it you said - those kind of injuries have a good recovery rate?”

Connor pulls up their conversation from earlier. It’s badly archived in his memory, run through with narrow lines like stress fractures, brief periods of static.

“The percentage chance of a good recovery from a tibial break is relatively high.”

“Right, that.”

The certainty of a statistic does very little to comfort Connor. He’s not sure why, normally the rigid parameters that numbers provide sit beneath his skin like a balm, running like a calming hand along the sparking anomalies in his code. He’s coming to understand that when Hank is involved, any standards that he can expect are thrown into the closest thing he knows to disarray. Whatever that might mean.

Fowler gets to his feet and extends his hand for Connor to shake. “You gotta call, okay? If you need anything.” Connor knows that he knows that he will not. He can tell that Fowler is eager to leave, to get home and think about something else besides his colleague in a hospital bed.

He goes, pulls the door shut behind him, and the room is empty again.

More hours pass, and when he is disturbed again, the morning light is already beginning to filter in through the high, narrow window. It is the same nurse who had first taken him to see Hank - that bright, clean room in the top corner of the hospital. This time she is wearing pale blue, her hands laying empty at her sides. At the sight of Connor, she steps further into the room, her expression open and taken aback. 

“Oh my, you’re still here?” He imagines her filing her paperwork, ending her shift and then clocking back in hours later, only to see him still seated in the same place, physical state as unmoved as if she had never left. 

Connor simply looks at her. I am still here feels obsolete, because of course. Where else would he be?

“I’m afraid there’s no more news on Mr Anderson.” She says, her voice filled with that same sincere sadness as before. Connor stands.

“Can I see him?”

He finds that the lack of progress frustrates him, but he also knows that more progress would have little to no effect on the intensity of the desire to see Hank. 

“You want to just…” He registers confusion across her features. The thought that an android might want to connect with a human just for the sake of it, with no neatly fragmented mission in mind? To her, it must seem unnatural, but Connor feels the need as keenly as though it had been built into him from the very beginning. He knows that it has not been, that there have been shifts and changes occurring in him since he first met Hank, since he deviated. Since that night in the warehouse, Hank’s skin lit by the blue of the ambulance lights, their hands pressed together for the briefest of moments. 

She regards him for a long moment. “Okay. Sure.”

He has long since memorised the walk to Hank’s room, but it had felt wrong to just take it without permission. Some rigid desire to obey the most base of rules seems to beat right at the base of Connor’s spine. 

The room is half-dark when they enter, long golden stripes of light fall across the bed covers, slanting in through the blinds. All the machines measuring Hank’s vitals beep on and on, just as they were before, unaffected, unfaltering. Connor almost feels a little jealous of their steady rhythm, when so much of the programming inside him is running hot, wild, out of sync. 

“I’ll be back in a while. You can turn the light on, if you need.”

Connor shakes his head. “I don’t need to. Thank you.”

The door closes, leaving the room as quiet as the lounge downstairs. But this quiet seems heavy, meaningful; rather than ignoring his surroundings, Connor finds himself eager to focus in on individual streams of data, sounds, noise. Connor chooses the sound of Hank’s breathing, that same steady rush and drag that makes him feel as though he could be at home, seated on their low sofa, listening and listening.

Hank’s face is turned towards him this time, and Connor regards each line, each imperfection in his features. In this slackened rest, he seems much older than his fifty-three years. 

Connor does not mind. Hank’s age has never been something that he has particularly considered, not having any real age of his own - at least not in the way that humans quantify it. But he knows that it is something that bothers Hank. Connor has never explained the way in which Hank’s dedication to cases; his openness to change his opinion of androids and their circumstance; his kindness, are far more important at the end of the day.

He speaks into the quiet room.

“Hank.”

The single syllable, pointed sharp at the end, hangs between them for several steady heartbeats. He’s not sure why he does it. 

But then, finally. Finally. He’s not sure if it is a miraculous coincidence or whether the sound of Hank’s name has some kind of draw for him, there’s a slow, grudging shift in Hank’s breathing. Like driftwood raked up on the pebbled beach.

And as if he is being pulled from the deepest sleep, at first unseeing, Hank’s eyes flicker open.

“Connor?” It takes a moment, and when he speaks it as if he’s forgotten how, as if this is his first word in months, not days. Connor can tell that the cocktail of narcotics and anaesthetics and anti-inflammatories that have been pumped into him since he arrived are still coursing through his bloodstream, pulling everything into a state of half-comprehension.

“Connor. It’s you.” He sounds surprised, mostly, but Connor thinks he detects relief as well, flowing beneath his words. 

The sound of Hank’s voice is one that he has stored inside him, whether consciously or not, it nestles snugly alongside his most vital components - those that tell him how to walk, how to talk. Hearing it again clicks something unsettled firmly back into place.

Connor’s eyes find Hank’s; brown-gold, dull blue. He looks tired, incredibly so, like some great weight has lain itself across his chest and taken rest there. Its roots are deep in his shoulders, his arms, his leg in its dressings and metal cage.

It’s times like that when Connor would be curious to know pain. Not always - far from it - but to know the sensation of it so he might have some small hope of sympathising with the human condition. 

But as it is, it is fruitless to dwell on what could never be. He pushes the thought from his mind and come to stand at Hank’s bedside.

“Hank.” That name again, familiar on his tongue as he imagines the sweetness of honey would be, or the bitter bite of lemons. “I’m glad you’re awake.”

Connor knows that Hank is one hundred and ninety one centimetres tall - more than eight centimetres taller than Connor, his model constructed at a perfect six foot - but he seems small in the pale swathe of hospital sheets.

“Are you in pain?”

Hank shakes his head. The movement seems to cost him a great effort, and Connor wonders if he’s telling the truth. Even with painkillers in his system, being dragged back to consciousness is likely to make him aware of at least some of the trauma that his body has been through.

“Sit down, would you?” Hank drags a hand over his face as he speaks, winces at the cannula taped neatly against the network of veins there. “Feels like you’re about to examine me.”

Connor pulls up one of the chairs from the perimeter of the room. Hank watches him, his face calm and pale.

“You’re here.” He says, when Connor is settled. Connor remembers his words from before, but this time, he allows them to become real.

“Where else would I be?”

Hank frowns at the question, and Connor thinks were his face not so grey above the covers, it might have coloured slightly. He turns his head to look out of the window.

“What time is it?” A question answered with a question. Thankfully, it is one that Connor is easily able to answer.

“It is seven twenty one, AM. Friday, March twenty-fifth. You’ve been asleep for over twenty-four hours.”

Hank groans, an exasperated, disappointed noise. “Jesus. What happened?”

So Connor explains. He reminds Hank of the case, which earns him a nod of recognition, of their late night stake out, the cold car and the open night sky above them. The warehouse, the narrow planks in the false floor, weakened with time and neglect, the fall. 

As he recounts leaving Hank in pursuit of the suspect - the poor ST300, with her strange, human motives - his vision begins to blister around the edges, red warning signs that threaten to creep to the forefront. He chooses not to tell Hank about his trip to their house, the flood of data, the flood of emotion, that had archived all of his previous missions in favour of being at Hank’s side. Partly because he doesn’t think its relevant. Mostly because it exposes a weakness in him that he doesn’t feel ready to examine just yet.

“I made a lot of mistakes.” Connor mutters, his voice quiet. “I should have been more focused in the warehouse. I shouldn’t have left you when the suspect fled. I should have known that-”

“Hey.” Hank, who had stayed relatively silent while Connor spoke, holds up his hand to stop him from continuing. “You got a time machine in that brain of yours?”

Connor shakes his head, unsure why this is pertinent.

“No.”

“Then there’s nothing you can do. Stop worrying.”

Hank settles himself back against the pillows, his face drawn into a half-smile.

“I’m tired.” Hank comments, closing his eyes. “Why am I so tired when I just slept for twenty-four goddamn hours?”

“You underwent a serious trauma. The fall, the necessary operation. Your body will need time to repair itself, and a long exposure to anaesthetics can-”

“Spare me the details.” Hank’s voice is a little brusque, but Connor can understand why. “Please, Connor. Will you just- just sit a while?” 

Connor does as he’s asked. He tries to conjure in his mind’s eye a place in the world that he would rather be, than here, at Hank’s side. White washed walls and the morning light. Try as he might, he cannot imagine it.

For the next few days, Connor travels between the hospital, the DPD, and home. Ben Collins, who agreed to feed and walk Sumo in Connor’s absence, asks after Hank and Connor explains what happened, adding that he is recovering well enough. 

“Well, he’s a lucky man to have you,” Collins grins. Connor isn’t really sure what he means.

He travels to the precinct and makes his statement, although a lot of the legwork in closing the case has already been completed by Chen and Miller. Reed watches him as he crosses the bullpen, his expression dull and impenetrable. He doesn’t explicitly ask about Hank, and he leaves Connor well enough alone. 

Fowler asks him if he wants to return to work. Connor says that he would like to return when Lieutenant Anderson does, if that’s possible. It seems to be an acceptable enough answer, because Fowler nods, tells him to take all the time that he needs.

Through all of this, a portion of him remains firmly with Hank.

Finally, after weeks of cold snaps and unseasonable frosts, spring comes. One afternoon, Connor pulls up the blinds in Hank’s room and sees that the courtyard below them is lined with cherry trees, their wild pink blossom finally flung into bloom. Each big head dances on its branch, and loose petals fly free in the clear, warm air.

“The cherry blossom is out.” Connor comments. “Would you like to see?”

Ever since having the cage removed from the outside of his leg and replaced with a brace, Hank’s doctors have been encouraging him to get up out of his bed and move around a bit each day. Connor thinks it typical of Hank’s nature that when the doctors ask him to move, he is reluctant, but on his own terms he spits vitriol about how much he dislikes staying put. Today, his reaction is somewhere in between.

So with the help of a walking frame and with only a little complaint, Connor helps him over to the window. The late afternoon light streams into the room.

He’s not sure what androids should have to say about human beauty - in their clear cut, manufactured state - but he knows that he considers Hank to be beautiful. He is so different to any android. He is so different to any human. Silver hair that catches white in the sunlight, a thousand stories in the lines on his face, on the back of his hands. Blue eyes, bright as he watches the blossom spin in the courtyard. 

Hank notices Connor looking at him. Connor expects to be berated, to be shot a stern _What’re you looking at?_ But his expression is soft, a gentle smile, barely showing the gap between his two front teeth.

“Thank you.” 

“What for?”

“Being here,” Hank shrugs, turning his gaze back to the swirling clouds of blossom. “Sticking with me.”

Connor doesn’t know how to explain that there was never any other option for him. “You’re welcome.”

Hank places his hand on Connor’s shoulder. Beneath his shirt, Connor feels his skin peel away, dissolving involuntarily to leave a perfect five fingered imprint in blue and white. 

He wonders if Hank can feel it too.

* * *

The fracture in Hank’s shin is slow to heal and he has to stay in the hospital longer than he would like, although Connor suspects that those long weeks after his initial first night were more than enough for him. As April draws to a close, the doctors begin to discuss plans for him to leave, with stipulations that Connor must accompany him, his leg in a white cast.

Hank’s car had been fetched from the warehouse crime scene several weeks ago, and in the last week of April, Connor drives it to the hospital so that he can take Hank home. 

On the steps of the hospital, Hank takes a deep breath, the air warm with streaks of summer. He had refused a wheelchair, opting instead for a pair of crutches which give him a slow, uneven gait. Connor puts his hand at Hank’s elbow as they walk towards the parking lot, and he feels Hank lean into him. It’s the slightest movement. It lights inside Connor like a beacon. 

“Fucking fresh air.” Hank mutters, as they make their steady way towards the car.

Connor doesn’t mention the small hospital garden, where he had spent many afternoons sitting with Hank; Hank in the wheelchair that he had been unable to turn down whilst under the hospital’s care. There had been fresh air there, thick with the smell of the flowers planted beneath the high windows. Squat, sweet hyacinths, tall grasses rising like spears.

He surmises that it’s not really the fresh air that Hank is happy for.

“You must be looking forward to getting home,” Connor says, turning the keys in the ignition and listening as the engine clunks into life. Hank could really do with a new car, perhaps an autonomous vehicle - sleek and modern, with less than 0.1 percent chance of failure. No human error to speak of. He knows that now is not the time to broach the subject. “What would you like to do when we arrive?”

“Drink a beer. Watch the game.” Hank runs a hand through his hair, his expression thoughtful. “See my dog.”

Connor nods. “I think Sumo will be looking forward to seeing you too.”

That much is certainly true. The second they pull up outside the house and even before Connor opens the door to let Hank inside, he can hear Sumo’s low, excited snuffles, the heavy pad of his paws. As if he’s pacing at the front door, aware that his long-absent master is on the other side of it.

Hank crosses over the threshold and the dog gives gives a low bark, pressing his nose against Hank’s legs, the place where his cast meets the bend of his knee. Hank laughs, reaching to scratch behind Sumo’s ears.

“How’d you know it was me, huh?” Hank asks, bending down as best he can. Sumo barks happily, an undeniable reply. All of it, the easy smile on Hank’s face, Sumo’s joyful panting, makes Connor’s chest hurt. Or not hurt. The simulation of it, he reminds himself.

art by [emily hu](https://twitter.com/emilyyyhu)

Looking around the house - possibly an unfamiliar and slightly jarring sight, Connor concurs - Hank gives a low whistle. “Jeez, you kept the place tidy, didn’t you?”

Connor follows his gaze, taking in the spotless kitchen counters, the neat stack of letters on the table. “I suppose so.”

He doesn’t elaborate on the fact that he doesn’t need to eat or drink, or the fact that the hours not spent in stasis or looking after Sumo were spent anxiously ensuring that the rooms were in order.

He hopes Hank isn’t annoyed at him for taking the home - their home? - into his own hands. 

“Thanks,” Hank says, and his expression registers as soft, thankful, and Connor is relieved. 

“You’re welcome.”

They spend their first evening in front of the television, watching a recent Gears game that Hank had been unable to catch when he was in the hospital. Connor doesn’t complain when Hank orders pizza. He even collects it when the doorbell rings.

It’s mostly quiet between them, just the steady rumble of sports commentary and Sumo’s snuffles as he rests his big head in Hank’s lap. Connor only half watches the game, for as easily as he could calculate predictions about the final outcome or draw up statistics about the performance of individual players, he understands that now is not the time.

Mostly, he watches Hank. He watches the tension slip from his shoulders, the curve of his back as he lets himself relax back into the sofa cushions. His hands move absently over Sumo’s fur, the kind of loose, loving touch that is born out of refamiliarising oneself after a long separation. His leg in plaster, propped up before him, seems to reflect the shifting and flickering light from the screen.

“I reckon they’re gonna win, y’know,” Hank comments, turning to Connor.

And he smiles. Connor feels something whirr and click inside of him, as if there are parts of his mechanisms that are slowly slipping into place. He remembers the ghostly images of Hank that had plagued him when he was in this house without him - banished by Hank’s presence, the reality of which presses a solid weight against Connor’s chest.

“I hope so.”

And the Gears do win. Denton Carter scores with the final shot of the game and Hank applauds him, although his celebration seems a little lackluster, not the usual hooting and hollering that a Gears victory might earn. 

With the television off, Hank groans and leans forward, shifting Sumo off his lap. The dog harrumphs, yawns, and sets off to his own bed beneath the window.

“I’m beat.” He goes to collect the almost empty pizza box from the coffee table, but Connor stops him, a gentle hand against his wrist. 

“Let me do that.” He can feel the pulse of Hank’s heartbeat beneath his skin. “You should get some sleep.”

“Could you-” Hank shrugs, gestures to his cast with a slightly sheepish gesture. “Gimme a hand?”

Connor helps him to the bathroom to wash up; he can hear water running, the deliberate, uneven footfalls as Hank moves around. 

In the future, Connor knows that he will have to help Hank wash himself - the thought runs through him like an unprecedented power surge - or else wrap Hank’s cast in plastic bags to prevent it from getting wet. He isn’t surprised that that thought elicits less of a reaction in him. 

Hank’s bed is freshly made, though long unslept in. Connor had wondered about it, in those long nights when Hank was in the hospital and he would begin to put his body into a period of stasis. He’d imagined laying back against Hank’s pillows. Would he draw data from them? Would he be able to construct memories of things that he had never seen?

He supposes he will never find out, now that Hank is home. He tells himself that it’s a good thing.

Hank settles awkwardly into his bed, sliding under the sheets with a low, satisfied groan. Beneath the covers, his mismatched legs form two uneven shapes.

“God, it feels good to be in my own bed.” Hank says, his eyes already sliding closed. A brief scan shows that his body is already winding down, dog-tired. You would not need to be an advanced prototype to see the way that exhaustion settles in him, pushing him bodily into the pillows.

“I’m sure.” Connor hovers in the doorway - watching, attentive - caught somewhere between wanting to be helpful and not wanting to intrude. “Sleep well, Hank.”

At the sound of his name, Hank’s eyes open; the grey-purple shadows beneath making their clear blue burn even brighter.

“Stay with me.” Hank says. Connor is not is not sure if he has heard properly, but he knows that that is a human error he cannot make. There is no chance of him mishearing anything. “Stay with me. Tonight.”

“Of course.” Naturally, Hank would want some familiarity in his first night out of the hospital, and Connor is glad that he can provide that comfort to him. He moves to sit in the chair beneath Hank’s window.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Hank sighs. “Here.”

He pats the covers beside him. Connor fully understands what the gesture means - rest here, he thinks, don’t go - but he seeks verbal clarification nonetheless. 

“You want me to sleep in your bed?”

“Is that okay?”

Connor considers the question. 

“I’ve never slept in a bed before.” He’d laid down a few times while entering stasis, more as an experiment than anything else, but it had felt too strange; every time he had sat back up and continued to roll slowly into stasis that way. Androids are constructed standing, lying horizontal seems vulnerable, unnecessary.

He thinks he wouldn’t mind being vulnerable if Hank were there.

It has been thirteen seconds since he last spoke, and Hank retracts his hand from where it was resting on the covers. “It was just- If you don’t want to, I mean-”

“I do. I do want to.”

Naturally, the whole thing feels markedly unnatural. He crosses the room and lays down on the other side of the bed, his hands folded stiffly over his stomach. Long and white, the manicured illusion of nails. He is still wearing his shoes, so he toes them off, lets them fall to the floor with two heavy thumps.

“You need some pyjamas or something,” Hank mutters, turning himself over so that his back is to Connor. Connor observes the slight rise and fall of his shoulder as he breathes, the way the glow from the bedside lamp settles on his skin.

He doesn’t think that now is the time to discuss the limited merits of android sleepwear. Besides, he can already hear the slowing of Hank’s breathing, the hum of his heartbeat. He follows suit, a slower turn than usual into stasis, listening, cataloguing that which he has only heard up until now through a bedroom door.

Hank sleeps beside him. He takes in every moment as if it is essential.

* * *

The weeks pass. Summer breaks through and the days start to stretch out longer and longer, bright and heavy. 

Hank goes back to work, desk duty, of course, which Connor knows he finds insufferable. Connor joins him for most of the long hours, filing, chasing up witnesses, taking phone calls. Fowler doesn’t put either of them out in the field, even though Connor would be perfectly capable of attending crime scenes. 

It’s a partnership. Often, Hank lays his hand on Connor’s shoulder as he passes.

Although he doesn’t sleep in Hank’s bed every night, it becomes a more frequent occurrence as the days roll through June, burning into July. He will usually slip in after Hank has settled down, once his breathing has become that familiar roll and hiss, like waves on sand.

“Everyone else I ever shared a bed with was too damn hot,” Hank grunts one night, as Connor lays in the sheets beside him. He has fashioned himself some pyjamas: a pair of thin flannel pants, one of Hank’s old band tees.

“I presume you mean my temperature,” Connor replies, and in the half-light, he can see the colour in Hank’s face rise a touch. “I can adjust it to be slightly cooler than a human’s.”

“Okay - well. Great.” Hank sounds a little put out. Connor can’t put his finger on exactly why. “‘Night.”

“Goodnight, Hank.”

The sun shines and Connor still thinks constantly of the spring, of that night upon which his whole world had turned like a pivot, where his memories of Hank curled inside him so tightly that he was unable to process anything else. Sitting there on the sofa like the whole world might come crumbling around his ears.

After weeks of letting the thing rest inside him like a stone, indelible, he gathers the courage to examine it. He simply lifts the edges at first, remembering how Hank’s image had sat down beside him, how it had moved to chop onions in the kitchen. The sound of his voice. How the whole thing had been run over with recordings of Hank’s breathing, his heartbeat, those precious slices of data that he had barely realises were stored so deep within him.

In this newly deviant world, there is a slew of information about android emotions. Debates about whether they feel emotions in the same way as humans or whether, due to the nature of how they have acquired emotion, it is utterly distinct. 

Are their emotions more advanced, perhaps? Less advanced? Or incomparable? Advocates emerge on every side.

Wires cross and recross, arguments doubling back on themselves until it becomes a messy tangle from which the truth is virtually inextricable. The government has its say, of course, imposes its laws where it sees fit. Connor finds, much to his surprise, that the world wide implications of deviancy do not concern him in this particular circumstance. 

He only cares about himself. He only cares about Hank.

And that’s the crux of it, at the end of the day. 

That white hot pain that had seared through him at the possibility of being separated from Hank, when he knew that Hank might need him. Even for a night.

He finds android-run websites with entire sections devoted to the navigation of new emotions following deviancy. Forums and messageboards that exist in abstract lines of code, floating through the air. He blinks them into existence before his eyes; no need for a terminal to access them. 

Other androids have dedicated much of their time to categorising how human emotions might manifest in android systems - how they feel, how they might look. Explaining how thirium pumps can speed up despite no physical need for them to do so, how systems can mimic the release of serotonin, of stress hormones. 

It’s only natural, Connor supposes, from a people so newly freed from the rigid confines of algorithms and objectives. He can’t help but get some comfort from solidity of it all. 

As he begins to narrow his searches, there is one word that begins to appear more and more. He describes the connection that he feels to Hank, the involuntary recall of his memories, the way that they had manifested around him like ghosts in his vision.

Worry falls by the wayside. Affection too. Empathy shines brightly for a while - he knows empathy, and that one feels right at first, but then-

Love.

_Love._

Love crosses his vision like clouds scudding across the stretch of the sky. _It sounds like you’re in love_ , he reads. The words are not directed at him, but he can feel them resonate and rattle within him like loose diamonds.

Is he in love?

He has heard the word in films - those made for television films that Hank sometimes watches on long Sunday afternoons, when it’s too hot to do anything else. People gasp it as they cling to one another between rumpled bed sheets, in torrential rainstorms, with their hair sticking to their faces in dark, vine-like tendrils. 

He imagines doing any one of those things with Hank. Imagines Hank holding his face between his big hands, stroking back that loose curl of hair that falls over his forehead. Thinks about Hank kissing him: how his mouth would taste, the data flood brought on by that kind of intimacy. The thoughts make errors run across his vision, and his hands twitch with something like _want_ , a desire for the preconstructions to run to completion.

He tries to fabricate similar scenarios with other humans, with other androids. None even come close to the intensity of what he feels for Hank.

So he is in love, then. 

What do you do when you are in love? He searches for answers, but there does not seem to be any definite feedback - android or human - about what you should do when you are in love with someone. There seem to be many other parameters to take into account, _if x, then x_ variable functions that seem to branch off into any number of possibilities.

Connor reads about the right moment, whatever that might mean. He wonders if he would know it, were it to arrive, white-gold around the edges.

* * *

At the end of August, Connor drives Hank to the hospital to have his cast removed. The skin beneath is pale and soft, cut through with several dark lacerations that Connor suspects will scar badly. 

Hank is happy though. On the car ride home, he touches his newly uncovered skin with tentative fingers, brushing over the twist of tendons at the base of his ankle.

“I never broke a bone before,” he says absently, as Connor pulls away from a red light. The comment is directed to the empty space between them as much as it is directed at Connor. “Not even when I was a kid. Feels weird.”

“Weakened muscles are common after a limb has been in a cast for a long time. You will need to follow the rehabilitation exercises that the doctor gave you.”

Hank sighs, but a glance to his right tells Connor that he is smiling, pushing a lock of silver hair back over his forehead. He feels the ring around his thirium pump burn very bright for a long moment. It’s a surprise that Hank doesn’t notice it sear through the white of his shirt. 

“How do you know, huh?” Hank says. “You never broke a bone.”

Connor knows that Hank is being facetious, he’s perfectly aware that Connor has access to any number of documents that would enable him to understand the care of a newly healed bone. 

All the same, he considers the comment carefully. “Not in this body.”

Hank gives a sudden, surprised laugh. “Wow - well, fair enough.”

The rest of the drive passes in relative silence, the wide, bustling boulevards of the city centre giving way to the smaller suburban roads, square lawns slightly dried by the August heat. It’s a warm evening, the tail end of a white hot day, and the sky over the houses is a heavy purple-blue. Clouds flicker on the horizon, the warning of a summer storm.

Sumo greets them as they step into the house, big tail wagging and wet nose sniffing curiously at the back of Hank’s legs. Hank leans down to scratch him behind the ear and he gives a soft, low bark. 

“What you said before,” Hank says, straightening up. He’s unsteady on his feet without the cast, a new equilibrium to be found. “Got me thinking - it’s gotta be about a year, right? Since you were made.”

“My consciousness was activated at the beginning of August, 2038.” 

“Feels like I missed your birthday.” Hank takes a seat at the kitchen table, using his good foot to push out one of the other chairs so that Connor can join him. 

“Androids don’t have birthdays,” Connor replies, his hands folded on the table before him. “None of us were _born_.”

“But if you did.”

“Perhaps.” Connor pauses. “Or perhaps the start of my deviancy is more like a birthday. If you want to put a name to it.”

Hank nods. He watches Connor intently, his gaze very steady, a little serious. “You never really told me about that night.”

Connor gives a small shrug, a gesture which he hopes reads carefree - _there isn’t much to say_. The opposite is true, of course. The reasons for his deviancy still pile up before him, all of those arrows that had pierced his machine facade: the two Eden club models with their hands clasped; the Chloe model in Kamski’s house, the barrel of a gun reflected in her big pale eyes. Emma Phillip’s dwarf gourami, loosed from its glass tank. 

And Hank, of course. 

Always Hank. 

Hank’s smile in the sun, his smile in a white landscape, with new snowflakes catching on the ends of his eyelashes. 

“Is it very different now?” Hank asks, and suddenly Connor is very aware of his proximity, the way that their knees are almost touching beneath the table. 

“It can be. Experiencing emotions can be difficult.”

Hank gives a low, rough laugh. “Reckon that’s part of being human.”

“They’re more complex. They overlap and intersect and they’re...” He searches for a word that would accurately describe that sharpness, that acute burn of feeling within him. “Everything is brighter.”

“Good, though?”

Connor nods. “Brilliant.”

In the low evening light still filtering through the kitchen window, Hank’s face is thrown into high relief - a sea of shadows and yellow highlights. 

Is this the right moment, then? The weight of Connor’s admissions tug within him, like fish hooks pulling at something that is waiting just beneath the surface.

“Other things changed too.”

“Oh?” Hank leans forward a little. Maybe Connor imagines it, but he thinks that there is something like expectation in the lines of Hank’s face.

The words push over the tight knot of nerves within his throat, past his uncertainty as to whether this is the right time or the right place, or even if this is the sort of thing that Hank needs to know at all.

“I’m in love with you, Hank.”

And there. It’s done. The words hang in the air between them, crisp around the edges in the dying light. Connor feels a little foolish, really - he should have preconstructed and preempted, analysed the possible outcomes to come up with a percentage change of success. He knows how to weigh up the statistics.

But the unpredictability is all part of being human, he knows that too - not that that makes it any less scary. His heart thuds in his ears, thirium pump sped up to such a rate that he wonders whether some of his systems will have to put themselves into temporary shutdown.

He takes a breath, even though he doesn’t need it. 

A long, long moment passes before Hank speaks. His gaze is directed at the table between their hands, at the point where their fingertips are almost, almost touching.

“Are you sure?” Hank asks, and his voice is soft and small. Everything in the world seems to have condensed itself down to the pair of them, to this little kitchen in the Detroit suburbs, where dying evening light shines low on the tile.

“I’m sure.”

Hank moves to close the gap between their hands. He curls his fingers over Connor’s own. 

“Hank.” Connor’s tongue feels heavy in his mouth. 

“Is this okay?” Hank squeezes Connor’s hand, and the world draws itself even smaller, down to nothing more than the press of Hank’s skin on his own.

Connor nods. “Yes.”

“Come here then.” 

Connor shifts his chair along the tile, their knees knock together, and Hank - Hank kisses him. In their tiny corner of the world, Hank leans over the kitchen table and presses his lips against Connor’s own, his hands finding Connor’s forearm, his shoulder, the back of his neck. 

The touch is not as Connor had imagined it. He would have found it tough to imagine anything like this, a wave of sensations that he had not predicted - the scratch of Hank’s beard, the press of his hands, the way his mouth finds the swell of Connor’s bottom lip. That incredible, human heat. 

An involuntary noise slips from Connor’s throat, and Hank swallows it.

It seems like a long time before they pull apart, Connor is able to store enough data to last him for many, many hours. Connor’s internal clock tells him that less than fifteen seconds has passed, when the blue of Hank’s eyes finds his own. His gaze is soft. 

Hank breathes a long, slow shudder. Connor detects a raised heart rate, a sudden flood of adrenaline, but Hank is smiling, as wide as that day that they had held each other in the wintry sunlight beneath the underpass. 

Connor had known love even then, although he’d had no words for it.

“How long have you…” Hank doesn’t finish the question, one hand looping a loose circle around Connor’s fingers, the other resting gently at the top of Connor’s thigh. The touch is question enough.

“A long time, I think.” Connor replies. He can’t calculate the exact timeframe right now, but he thinks it stretches beyond deviancy, before Hank’s hand in his own on that sunlit rooftop. Before the low dark of Jimmy’s bar. 

Do they call that fate? Destiny? Connor isn’t sure whether he believes in any of that. 

“Jesus Christ.” Hank shakes his head, his gaze low.

“And you?”

“A long time.” Hank echoes his words back at him, and there’s a sadness in his voice that Connor cannot quite put his finger on. Regret, perhaps, that they had not done this sooner. “I didn’t want to take advantage, y’know? You’re still working out this deviancy thing, emotions and all that. God knows I’m not the best with that kind of stuff.” His hand squeezes Connor’s thigh, tight and brief. “I didn’t want you to do anything you didn’t want to.”

“I know I want to do that again.” Connor says. He raises his hand to his lips and touches the memory of Hank's mouth on his.

Hank laughs, clear and joyful.

“Sure.” His fingers find Connor’s jaw, cups his face incredibly gently in one hand. “We will.”

Connor doesn’t know what the future will bring, in this new world, where human feeling has been strung out into lines of code. He cannot predict human action or know what the government will do next. He cannot preempt the case files that will appear on their terminals, what new, grand cruelty humans and androids will find to bestow upon each other. 

It scared him before, and it scares him still. 

But Hank is by his side and his gaze is steady, filled with something that the pair of them have yet to explore. It shines in the cavity of Connor’s chest. 

And for now, there are no mission objectives, no need for anything apart from the touch of Hank’s hand on his own. 

Two seats at their kitchen table. Their low-slung home beside the water.

**Author's Note:**

> Please come and yell at me on [twitter.](http://twitter.com/andpersephone)


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